Whenever we are asked about who is doing our translations, the common expectation is that either we do the work “in-house” or we just “send it out” to “a translator.” However, the translator community, at least within Language Solutions, mainly consists of a regular group of professional freelance linguists who live all around the world. A lot of our regular translators have worked with us for many years. Some even started out with us almost 20 years ago.
As it is with many industries, you tend to get to know people you work with throughout the world and those relationships become very important professionally and personally. However, it seems that translator community who live in the “freelance” society are not always thought of as a “part of the team” in their business with many companies. That relationship sometimes is hard to explain when a lot of the collaboration happens in the background and away from the customer.
Why is our relationship with the translator community important to the customer?
For the customer, it comes right down to quality. We are invested in our team and they are invested in us. We want each other to succeed …plain and simple.
Loyalty also plays a major role and when your teams are loyal to one company, they take on those hairy jobs or rush assignments and do them very well. We regularly work in healthcare translations and our regular teams that specialize in this field go above and beyond for us all the time in working with demanding clients.
As we work on projects with translators, we get to know most of them very well. Whenever big events in life happen like the recent Harvey and Irma hurricanes, we feel the impact it has on our translators in these affected areas. We’ve been in touch with our translators in Houston, Orlando and Puerto Rico who are fortunately doing well, although some are dealing with needing a lot of clean up. The same concern happens to translators who were worried about events in our area and they kept in touch. It goes both ways.
Just recently, we delivered a website project for Puerto Rico that required planning, lots of pre-flight on our end and collaboration between our in-house Project Management, our translator currently residing in Mexico and our editor in Puerto Rico…..all while hurricane Irma was heading towards Puerto Rico and our editor needing to board up his house as we continued to work on the site. As the hurricane went through, we were out of communication for some time as we worked with our translator in Mexico to review the final stages.
Luckily it all worked out and mostly without any interruption to the progress we had to make to stay within the deadline. But the concern for loss of property and lives is certainly also on our minds and we feel fortunate that we have built close relationships with our translators that we can show support when it is most needed. When Hurricane Harvey hit one of our translator’s homes in Houston, we immediately sent out supplies via Amazon to help with the cleanup. Those relationships are important to us and to the translator community as well who typically live in a strange world of the freelance society.
Do you work remotely with others? How do you stay engaged and support one another?
